Damn nice dude! Hows that ultrabook do on games? My previous build I had the i7 in and that build cost me about $3,200 with everything (speakers, keyboard, everything). My AMD build this time cost me $1,000 so I'm not complaining with that. About to see what Hitman: Absolution does at midnight on my PC. I got a promo for the graphics card I bought and received three downloadable games for free on Steam for buying it. Sleeping Dogs, Far Cry 3, and Hitman

Damn nice dude! Hows that ultrabook do on games? My previous build I had the i7 in and that build cost me about $3,200 with everything (speakers, keyboard, everything). My AMD build this time cost me $1,000 so I'm not complaining with that. About to see what Hitman: Absolution does at midnight on my PC. I got a promo for the graphics card I bought and received three downloadable games for free on Steam for buying it. Sleeping Dogs, Far Cry 3, and Hitman

i only play retro games, it's fine with those. the graphics is factory intel, probably not good enough for the new games. but for cpu-heavy tasks, the thing's smooth

laptops are a poor choice for pure gamers: alienware is probably the best of the bunch and it's costly. definitely stick to a desktop or custom build if gaming is your thing

laptops are a poor choice for pure gamers: alienware is probably the best of the bunch and it's costly. definitely stick to a desktop or custom build if gaming is your thing

I agree. I had an Alienware M17x built to my perfection and it was about $3,300 to my house. It started overheating on GTA IV and after I was sick of the performance with what I paid, I sent it back to them within 30 days. I decided to build a desktop for the same amount of money with Intel (i7, best mobo at the time, etc). After 3 years my liquid cooling exploded over all my components and lost everything. On my second build now with AMD. Personally, for the money, AMD seems to be the best budget based computer. But damn did the Alienware laptop look appealing as hell against my Dell Inspiron 1420..

I agree. I had an Alienware M17x built to my perfection and it was about $3,300 to my house. It started overheating on GTA IV and after I was sick of the performance with what I paid, I sent it back to them within 30 days. I decided to build a desktop for the same amount of money with Intel (i7, best mobo at the time, etc). After 3 years my liquid cooling exploded over all my components and lost everything. On my second build now with AMD. Personally, for the money, AMD seems to be the best budget based computer. But damn did the Alienware laptop look appealing as hell against my Dell Inspiron 1420..

hehe, i'm pretty loyal to intel, but likely based on personal experience and not unbiased stats. i've had 4 amd builds total, and they were all bad experiences:
1st: 286, bad deal (overpaid and behind the times), overall a shoddy setup
2nd: 386, again, was behind the times and not a great deal
3rd: k6 laptop, worked well but then was stolen by a bitter hoe
4th: thunderbird (built for counter-strike), was good for a ~1yr and then the entire thing went bust one day (cpu melted i think)

meanwhile, i've had some interesting experiences with intel:
first intel was a Pentium-133 that i got sr yr of high school. lasted all the way through college and then i handed it down to an ex (gf at the time). also have a dell p4 laptop that i got in '03. it still runs, actually not bad for web/email, just gotta wait 20 minutes for it to boot up. and then my current lineup, all still rockin'. there are more, but anyway, of all the pentium builds i've been involved with, only one actually broke (and it was the hd, not the cpu). the rest, most got handed down over and over until i lost track.

i'm still curious which setup in my lineup is most powerful for raw-force, the quad-xeon (woodcrests) mac or the i7 ultrabook. both are pretty smooth when it's a cpu-heavy task. the xeons are older but osx is also leaner. i don't think i ever saw the resource monitor on the mac report over 50% cpu use, so arguably 2 of my xeons haven't even been burned in yet. with more ram and an ssd, it'd probably be up there with the new stuff (though graphics upgrades are limited by the board).

. I personally love my SSD. First one I've ever owned and I've been thinking about just spending the extra money getting rid of my other HDD and buying 2 more SSDs. But at least have one HDD 1.5TB for music storage...no need to waste a SSD on music

I'll get a picture of the inside of mine when I feel like doing some cable management and taking it out from underneath the desk lol

yeah, i know i over paid for a underpowered machine, not unlike my car!

an observation from someone who's using both windows and osx: osx is much much leaner... don't have any hard stats, but i'm guessing the typical shelf life of a mac beats a pc. i paid over $5k for my mac pro setup in '07... planning to make it at least a decade (perhaps with more ram and an ssd soon)

an observation from someone who's using both windows and osx: osx is much much leaner... don't have any hard stats, but i'm guessing the typical shelf life of a mac beats a pc. i paid over $5k for my mac pro setup in '07... planning to make it at least a decade (perhaps with more ram and an ssd soon)

no doubt, been using mac for the last 10 years, started with the ibook 11in.

I gave my girlfriend my 6 year old imac, and it still works great, they last forever. Another good thing is their resale value, iphones and macs have phenomenon resale value, I bought a macbook air for 1300, sold it for 1100 after a year to get the retina macbook

that said, windows 8 looks great, and I wouldn't mind having one of these touchscreen laptop/tablet convertibles as my next computer